From War to PeaceThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster CapitalismBy Naomi Klein (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt &
Company, New York 2007
The Terror Dream By Susan Faludi (Henry Holt &
Company, New York 2007)The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in an Age of
EmpireBy Cynthia Enloe (University of California Press 2004)
Reviewed by Carol Anne Douglasoff our backs (September 2008, Vol 39)
I don't
want "to study war no more," but if we want peace, we have to
understand militarism.
For our
peace issue, I read The Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein, The Terror Dream by
Susan Faludi and The Curious Feminist
by Cynthia Enloe. The Shock Doctrine is one of the
scariest books I've ever read. Not gory, but frightening nonetheless. Klein
looks at how power elites use "shock and awe" to remake
countries—their own or other peoples'. She reviews the history of electric
shock treatments and then looks at the political uses of shocks. The Nobel
Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, revered by many U.S. conservatives,
liked the idea of creating a "blank slate" in which the
powers-that-be can convert nations to multinational capitalism.
One of
the early examples Klein uses is the dictatorship of General Pinochet, who
overthrew Chile's elected government in 1973. Pinochet used violent repression
to foist multinational capitalism on his country—with Friedman's approval and
encouragement.
Klein
describes how governments in capitalist countries, multinational corporations
and international lenders like the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund have taken advantage of shocks to promote capitalism in "less
developed" nations. The fall of Communism in Poland left the country poor:
Solidarity wanted to establish democratic socialism, but international lenders
pressed it to adopt capitalism as a condition for bailing out Poland's economy.
South Africa's African National Congress wanted to establish democratic
socialism, but its leaders focused on the political aspects of the transition
from apartheid, only to discover that the banks had acted behind their backs to
keep economic power in the hands of the white hierarchy.
Multinationals
took advantage of the 2004 tsunami to take over Sri Lanka's coastal fishing
areas and build expensive hotels, displacing the local people.
In
Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who had initially supported democracy, instead sold off
the state's assets for almost nothing to create a new class of billionaires.
And in China, Deng Xiao ping was so eager to create a profit-making economy
that he accepted Friedman's model of Pinochet-style autocratic capitalism. Yes,
specifically Friedman's. In China's case, the attack on demonstrators in Tiananmen
Square was the shock.
The U.S.
government also uses shock and awe at home. After Hurricane Katrina, some
conservative economists rejoiced that New Orleans was a "blank slate"
that they could rebuild, apparently without the poor (and Black) people.
Friedman said Katrina's destruction of the city's public schools was an
"opportunity" to move to a private school system. Instead of
rebuilding the school system, the city, guided by federal aid, moved to a
system of privately run charter schools
And of
course there's the shock and awe that the Bush administration has used to seize
and exploit Iraq—not to mention to cow a U.S. population that was terrified by
the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The
powers-that-be don't actually have to cause shocks like the attack on the World
Trade Center or Katrina in order to use them: Like Friedman, they see a shock
as an opportunity, Klein says.
She says
there are some places where people are waking up and resisting multinational
capitalism. She cites Venezuela as an example.
Klein's
book is brilliant, but I have a few quibbles. First, I wish she had integrated
feminism into her analysis of power relations. Second, I think she's too easy
on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sure, he's locked up the billionaires, but
he's also returned Russia to a dictatorship, which she briefly acknowledges but
does not analyze.
Also,
shock and awe didn't begin with Milton Friedman. (Klein notes that Stalin and
Mao used it, but doesn't say enough about how prevalent the tactic is.)
Conquerors have used it for centuries. The Romans used it when they conquered a
people. I recently read about similar tactics that the Manchus used when they
conquered China, destroying the Ming Dynasty. After a few weeks of massacres,
they recruited subdued Chinese scholars to administer the country for them.
There are probably endless examples.
Susan
Faludi's The Terror Dream focuses on gendered
reactions to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She looks at how the
U.S. government and the media used the attacks to assert male dominance and
silence feminist voices. The media and individual men vilified feminists like
Barbara Kingsolver and Susan Sontag who spoke out to say that Americans'
response should be thoughtful and nonviolent. When Kingsolver wrote appealing
to Americans' "capacity for mercy," a letter to the editor said her
article was "an act of terror." Sontag said "a few shreds of
historical evidence might help us understand" what has happened. Male writers
said she was blaming the victim, and even that she was deranged. Newsweek published an attack on these
feminist writers that called them airheads, morons and bitches. The Wall Street Journal published an
article that misquoted Kingsolver as saying the flag (you know which one) stood
for bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution into a paper
shredder. She had said the opposite: that the flag should not be used in that
way. In response Kingsolver got many threats, institutions retracted invitations
for her to speak and readers sent back her books. The Journal refused to publish Kingsolver's response or a retraction.
After
the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the number of women
published in newspapers and magazines and appearing on television plummeted.
Only male voices were heard. Television didn't even present the voices of Sens.
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., both chairs of Senate
subcommittees dealing with terrorism.
The
media revived the John Wayne image of masculinity and many men claimed that
feminists had emasculated American males. That was a return to an old image of
the American man, shaped by the experience of fighting Indians and its
portrayal by Hollywood, Faludi says. The media still hasn't recognized that the
extermination of Native Americans was genocide. She writes about the media
images of Superman and the heroes of Westerns.
When the
media wrote about the widows of men killed in the World Trade Center, it
focuses on stay-at-home mothers who said they would devote the rest of their
lives to their children, hardly ever mentioning the women who went back to
work, Faludi says.
She said
the nation's response to the attacks was weirdly disconnected from the real
emergency. She says we need to imagine a national identity "grounded not
in virile illusion but on the talents and vitality of all of us equally, men
and women both." We may need that vision, but what institutions will help
us shape it?
Faludi's
book certainly makes a point, but it lacked an economic analysis as Klein's
lacked a feminist analysis.
The
answer: Cynthia Enloe's The Curious
Feminist, a slightly older but invaluable book, which combines feminist,
anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist analyses.
Feminists
need to have the energy to be curious, not to accept that power configurations
are natural, traditional, or the ways things have always been, Enloe says. For
instance, she says, instead of accepting the term "cheap labor," we
should say "labor made cheap" and ask why it is cheap. The
starting point is taking women's lives—all women's lives—seriously and digging
deep to understand who and what has shaped them, Enloe writes.
"Patriarchal
systems have been so enduring, so adaptive, precisely because they make women
overlook their own marginal positions and feel instead secure, protected, and
valued," she says.
Her
focus is on all the ways that the military uses women and that women are
essential to its functioning: as prostitutes, wives, soldiers, workers and rape
victims. "Military rape and military prostitution are not separate,
they're connected," Enloe says. A
country's foreign policy is militarized if it equates national security with
military security and if it assigns the military a leading role in foreign
policy, she points out.
A
feminist foreign policy must ask whether those who are conducting foreign
policy are motivated in part by a desire to appear "manly" in the
eyes of their allies and enemies, Enloe says. A masculinized, militarized
foreign policy is not innocuous: It must be challenged. It will undermine
women's chances for power in the United States and in all the nations it
interacts with.
It is
dangerous that the U.S. equates military experience with political leadership, Enloe
says. It is wrong that that Americans have come to see the president primarily
as the commander-in-chief. While many men have no problem seeing a man who had
only pretend military experience as president, they find it implausible to see
a woman in that role.
Making
NATO the main instrument for building a new European security leaves out women,
Enloe points out. The United States wants to shift power away from the European
Parliament, which includes many women members.
In
another example, the U.S. government's billions of dollars of aid to Colombia,
supposedly just to combat drug trafficking, excluded Colombia's peace and
anti-drug movement, which was organized by women from many classes, Enloe
writes.

Despite
the fact that President Bush had pretended to be concerned about the Taliban's
extreme oppression of women in Afghanistan (which he didn't care about until
after September 11, 2001), programs for women were included in the aid budget
for Afghanistan and Iraq only because Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and a small group
of women in Congress pushed for money for women, Enloe says. The
first steps we should take in trying to take back our country and work against
militarization are to press for the United States to ratify the International
Criminal Court Treaty, the treaty banning land mines, and the treaty on the
rights of the child, she says. (Not to mention the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.) We need to watch for and oppose
policies based on the manliness and militarism, Enloe says.
The
tasks seem overwhelming, and, as Faludi's book points out, we'll be attacked
for attacking government by testosterone. But we can see what the result for
the world will be if we don't. Frankly, and I don't mind risking sounding like
a fanatic, feminism is the only thing that can save the world.

Mary Daly - NY Times obituary photo

Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big By Mary Daly (Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2006) Reviewed by Carol Anne Douglasoff our backs (2007, Vol 37)"Amazon Grace is a challenge and an invitation hurled out to Daring, Desperate Women everywhere.” Those are the opening words of the new book by Radical Feminist philosopher Mary Daly, the woman who turned “spinster” into a term of the highest praise and “hag” into an identity to claim. Since the publication of Beyond God the Father in 1973, Daly, trained as a Catholic theologian, has subverted patriarchal religion. (“God” is a verb, Daly said. She later said, “I am a verb.” She favors emphasis on active be-ing, not fixed, unmoving nouns.) In Gynecology, she broadened her challenge to all patriarchy. And there have been many books since. In her new book, Daly calls on women to reject despair and continue to be Wild and Sin Big against patriarchy. We face a challenge that could easily be overwhelming: We must face up to the danger that men could destroy the earth, and yet we must also preserve our true selves, not letting the patriarchy take away our ability to be creative and even to laugh. As in her last book, Quintessence, Daly visits with a radical foresister and with future foresisters who will be radical feminists in a world beyond patriarchy. And she also looks in detail at the horrors of ecological destruction, fundamentalist Christianity, and bushdom. Like many of us, she sees George W. Bush as the personification of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.” (First coined to describe the Nazi Adolph Eichmann.) But Daly also sees Bush and all his works as a distraction from pursuing our true goals. This particular foreground distraction we have to pay attention to, she observes, but we also have to look beyond it. In this book Daly praises Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, or at least refers to them as respected journalists. Yes. She feels that television is a deadly distraction that dulls our minds and should be avoided as much as possible (oh, I agree). However, she recognizes that the media has become so captive, so beholden to the president, that anyone who dared to take him on in any way (we’re talking before the 2006 election, although that still holds to some extent) was courageous. She is indignant that Rather was forced to apologize to Bush for the “unconfirmed” report on Bush’s military service. (Cronkite and Rather are patriarachs, of course, not all equally evil. She implies rather than says that.) Daly is appropriately enraged that the media has done so little about the bushites. “There seems to be little effort on the part of the formerly progressive media to really take a stand against those predators. On the contrary, they blandly and bleakly offer ‘both sides.’” She writes of television and shopping malls: “By lying to our senses, they lie to our minds, seducing us to mistake the unreal for the real.” “The feelings/emotions of those so deceived become twisted. They learn to favor the phony. Bored with nature, they prefer to be surrounded with fake everything. They themselves begin to fake everything. They fake happiness. Fearing the knowledge of unhappiness, they practice the habit of forgetting happiness. Having lost it, the choose not to find it.” They are candidates for totalitarian society, she says. Daly uses a time-leaping visit from Matilda Jocelyn Gage, who in her late 19th century book, Woman, Church and State, confronted patriarchal religion, to look at today’s fundamentalism. Things are just the same as they were in Gage’s day—but yet they aren’t, Daly says, because our propaganda is even more pervasive and our weapons are far more horrible. She shows Gage a television clip of the bombing of Baghdad in 2002, and Gage reels back, scarcely believing that anyone could do anything so horrible, much less that people watching it on television would not be horrified and enraged. Although Daly praises those in the media who speak out, she says the barrage of bad news is overwhelming, in part because the media does not show the big picture of what is happening. Daly observes that it does not name the cause of the apparently many-faceted problems: patriarchy. (Because, of course, patriarchs own the media.) The media does not report everything, and can bury important news. For a horrifying example, Daly cites an essay saying that in 1991 the U.S. military bulldozed thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were trying to surrender. It’s good that she found that item, which itself was quickly bulldozed. Back in 1991 I saw a tiny mention of that incident in The WashingtonPost and put a news item in off our backs. But I’ve never seen it referred to since. As far as I could determine, the Post never ran a correction saying it was untrue, or any other follow-up piece. I now feel less certain that the piece was accurate, because surely by now some soldier who participated would have a guilty enough conscience to make it public. Wouldn’t he? “’Memorial day’ really means ‘forgetting day,’” Daly writes. Daly looks at patriarchy’s unbelievable violence to the earth and the threatened extinction of half of the world’s species in the 21st century. She quotes scientists and journalists, both women and men, who are revealing the mind-boggling dangers. Daly quotes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the bushites’ Orwellian doublespeak: “When they destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Bill.” When Bush reportedly won the 2004 election, Daly slumped over and laid her head on her arms, and wondered how it could be that, even if the Republicans stole the election, so many people could have voted for him. In other words, she reacted much the same way most of us did. Like many other recovering Catholics (like me), she was particularly appalled that Catholic bishops suggested it was a sin to vote for Kerry because Kerry supported abortion rights. Daly writes of the millions who (at least in 2004, I hope fewer of them now) wanted Bush to stay on as president: “Words like ‘ignorance,’ ‘greediness,’ ‘stupidity’ or even ‘fear’ are not big enough to explain this stubborn blindness.” (Like most of us, she can slip into ableist language. Probably if she was reminded, she would have changed that word.) She quotes James Carroll of The Boston Globe as saying: “Something deeply shameful has us in its grasp.” I am so moved that Daly divides her focus between her unique voyaging and the anguish that so many of us have shared for the past few years. But I shouldn’t be surprised that a woman who detailed the oppression of women in witch-burning and foot-binding would also detail the destruction of the environment and the Republican takeover of America. Daly talks about the Republican control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and laments the lack of checks and balances. A Radical Feminist thinks about checks and balances in the U.S. federal government, almost like a liberal editorial writer? Yes, she does if she thinks. The truth is that most of us have taken for granted living in a constitutional democracy with a certain amount of freedom of speech, and even with elections that were relatively fair although the choices were very limited. And we really care about those things, among all our other values. And I’m glad when we admit it. Daly recognizes that we have to live simultaneously on different levels—in the patriarchal world as well as subverting it and looking beyond it. Cottie, Daly’s cat, always brings her back to thinking about what matters most to her, and to the world the way it should be. Of course we must be radically serious, but we also must be radically silly, to be as much of our authentic selves as we can, Daly says. “Wild Women justifiably Weep, Rage, and Act against the backlash and at the stealth campaign to shut us down. But we are also able to Laugh at it because of our Realizing Hope,” Daly writes. She observes that we have lost many our spaces, our books and bookstores, our women’s health networks, and so forth, but she says we understand that the backlash is due to the patriarchs’ ultimate impotence, so we can Laugh and move on. We recognize the tricksters’ tricks, she said. “They have tried to kill our memories and our hopes,” she says. Daly knows what it is to lose. She tells how she was forced out of her more than 30-year job at Boston College, a Jesuit school. The administrators lied, saying she had resigned though she had not. She also grieves because some of her important books have gone out of print. She quotes her book Pure Lust: “Rage is not ‘a stage.’ It’s not something to be gotten over. It is transformation.” But still she Laughs. Laughing breaks the Terrible Taboo (against female friendship), touching the spirits of women, awakening hope, she says. “Effecting changes in small places—seemingly small changes—is ineffably important, for this enables us to work within the flow of the small system and thus have impact elsewhere,” she writes. Even though we’ve been thrown off balance by our losses, we can regain our balance and reclaim space, perhaps by looking to the future, she says. A note about the past. As many feminists know, in 1979, Audre Lorde published an open letter to Mary Daly in which Lorde criticized Daly’s book Gynecology for telling about the oppression of clitoridectomy in Africa but not about African goddesses and connections among women of African descent. Lorde said she had sent the letter to Daly, but Daly never replied to her. Daly said the letter hit her so hard that she took five months to reply, but she did send a letter. In Amazon Grace, Daly says that in 2003 Alexis de Veau, Lorde’s biographer, found the letter in one of Lorde’s drawers and sent Daly a copy, asking her to confirm that it was hers. Daly reproduces it here. But back to the terrible present. Daly quotes Susan B. Anthony as saying it will take a “terrific shock” to awaken most women. Anthony said she wanted to “startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the degradation of their present position.” Daly says she does not believe Anthony meant the shock to be hideous—like a personal experience of violence—because the immediate effect of that kind of shock is horror, not self-respect. Daly thinks of the shock as a moment of awareness, and says her own moments of awareness have come from experiencing nature. Almost everything we read and hear tells us that those who think as we do are a small minority. But Daly says that if we include all the other species in the world, who have the standpoint that they and the earth should preserved, we are a cognitive majority. She believes that it is important to respect animals, and not to eat them. There are several animal characters in the story part of her imaginative narrative, including a brontosaurs (Brontie—note the name). In our arrogance, humans refer to “non-human animals.” Cats could refer to us as “non-feline animals,” although they seldom sink to that level of discourse, Daly says. “The only Hope for saving Life on the planet is Hopping Hope,” she writes. The only hope is hope? Is that redundant? No, indeed. We must hold onto hope. Both to preserve our sanity and to be able to act, we must hope. We could weep endlessly about what it happening, she observes, but that won’t solve anything. Be-ing Silly together is crucial, Daly says. I love her for saying that. Who but Mary Daly would think to praise silliness? I believe in laughter as a radical way of being. Not unthinking or cynical humor, but laughter as a way to cope with difficulties. I believe in silliness. Daly quotes Susan B. Anthony’s slogan: Failure is impossible. And that seems just the right thought for these times.